With so much uncertainty surrounding the 2020 Election, readers were hungry for updates wherever they could find them. This placed pressure on news publishers to provide those updates during a rapid-fire newscycle while keeping readers engaged and informed.
And the challenge didn’t end there: publishers needed a way to turn those casual readers coming for election news into loyal members of their community, keeping them engaged after results were called.
Luckily, OpenWeb partners had a way to do exactly that. Leading news publishers used OpenWeb’s Live Blog and Ask Me Anything virtual lounges to take advantage of election traffic and grow their communities.
Let’s take a look at how two of those publishers leveraged these features to promote healthy discussions within their communities, both during and after the election.
Ask Me Anything/AMA
An Ask Me Anything virtual lounge is an effective way to grow your community and keep readers engaged during election season and beyond. HuffPo launched a series of Ask Me Anything virtual lounges to help address their readers’ biggest questions about the 2020 election, including the presidential race, down-ballot races and measures, and voting issues.
Each AMA provided readers with the opportunity to engage with a HuffPo Politics Editor so they could get answers from a credible source in real-time. Readers could keep the conversation going with the ability to upvote the best comments, and HuffPo could surface those comments to the top of the conversation so that the best content was easy to find. Journalists could answer questions with their own viewpoints and provide additional sources like links to articles and tweets from other experts.
Using OpenWeb’s AMA feature, HuffPo provided a valuable service for their readers during a historic election. It proved to be an effective way of keeping readers engaged on their website longer, in turn helping turn those election day readers into loyal subscribers.
Live Blog
Real-time updates were key during an election where definitive results wouldn’t be announced for several days. To keep readers coming back for more, one leading news publisher used OpenWeb’s Live Blog feature to showcase live coverage of breaking election news.
With Live Blog, reporters could post up-to-the-second links to news stories, tweets, videos, and more. Readers could easily see all relevant election news in one place and had the option to upvote or downvote selected content. The publisher kept the Live Blog active even after election results were called to keep their audience engaged over time and continue growing their community.
Keep readers engaged after the election with actionable insights
For news publishers, keeping the election momentum going by turning first-time readers into loyal community members is top of mind. With OpenWeb’s quality conversation platform, publishers can get real-time insights into their users’ behavior to help inform their strategy well after election season has ended (and we’ve made it extra easy to seamlessly integrate your conversation data with our Google Analytics integration).
